Long doc, full of split-screens to fit as much rock action into the widescreen frame as possible, and still manages to miss major events (Creedence) in favor of a portrait of the guy who cleans the toilets (a highlight) and reporters hounding the fest organizer over whether the fest is losing money. With 30+ hours of music recorded that weekend plus all the interviews and split-screens, this event would be a prime candidate for the Eno treatment.
Peggy is recovering from a breakdown when she and her maid Griselda kill Peggy’s husband and go on the run. They get molested by a policeman in exchange for help escaping, and make it to a shanty town run by evil queen Edith Massey. These are all Waters regulars except for their new blonde lesbian roommake Muffy (“Nightclub Stripper” in Lady Street Fighter the same year), whose gf Mole gets a sex change at the end, but gets angry-inch’d. Movie is half wonderful, and half annoying (everyone is yelling all the time).
Not many places the story can go after opening with our guy in jail. It rewinds to him building a house for his hateful mom, then further, as a boy also failing to please mom. After the house, he moves new wife Erika to Munich and gets a construction job, where he works himself half to death (this is my second movie of the week where someone finances some furniture). Sure he’s a shopaholic capitalist, but he simply bought into the dream that if you work hard at a job you’re very good at, you can afford a comfortable life for your family. She gets pregnant, moves in with her parents, and he takes it hard, working more overtime and buying more stuff until he cracks under the strain and murders a friendly landlord.
Before the furniture arrived:
Mouseover to turn your murder-witness neighbor into your disappointed mother:
Opens with a tiresome assembly of college revolutionaries, and closes with a fancy house exploding again and again, all of its contents blasted into the air in lovely slow-motion.
In between is a shaggy story of aimless young people with inconsistent dubbing, just what you’d expect from Antonioni. Mark, a white guy with sideburns, has maybe shot a cop and definitely stolen a plane. He’s flying over the desert when he spots a girl in a car, and starts casually north-by-northwesting her. This is Daria, who is either heading to a work meeting with her boss or trying to ditch it and find a meditation retreat. These two lovebirds Gerry themselves into the desert, have a phantom orgy with twenty other couples, then repaint the plane and he takes off, only to be shot to death by cops as soon as he lands. She stumbles into her work meeting but seems distracted by news of her new boyfriend’s murder, goes outside and imagines it all blowing up again and again and again.
Antonioni creates a portrait of a volatile America that he (as a foreigner) and the hippies (as outsiders) see more clearly than others … Most of the major sequences make scant use of the dialogue or acting, and the plot mainly functions as a pretext for creating these sequences. Moods, landscapes, and a continual oscillation between documentary and abstraction are the central tools at Antonioni’s disposal, and the characters drift through the “dialogue of ambiance” like tour guides from the physical world.
I’ve watched part one before. Color fields flash and fade. Shots of the house and children have been turned into reddish defocused funhouse blobs. Almost-normal photography at the very end of a young kid feeding an even younger kid with a spoon.
2. Distinct textures in this one, not just more of the same. Added to the funhouse effect is some Melies house transformations with the kids as actors/witnesses, shimmering particle effects, and some really nice superimpositions, while the film processing looks like someone turning the color and tint up and down on a TV. The kids watch Shirley Temple on their own TV. Wild textures and flames, and a playhouse in the real house so he can mess with our sense of scale.
3. Ever more recognizable images of human activities. Getting out of the house more too, a picnic then a road trip. I never know how much of the apparently domestic footage is staged scenes vs. the rest of the family just living their lives while dad buzzes around them with a camera stuck to his face. If the latter, then it’s a fairly nude household.
4. Opens on his wife crying, then the kids are fighting too – this is the discord episode. A trip to the pool is edited into a fleshy mashup, two birds seen dimly. Stan does the dishes, and the color fields from part one return with a vengeance. Everyone shows us their penis then it wraps up at a baseball game.
I played the Silents Shuffle – MVP of each section: Anoushka Shankar, Squarepusher, Zorn’s Book of Angels, Orbital.
Mom (Petra von Kant) and Dad (Alex Allerson of all the ’76 Fassbinders) are leaving town on separate business trips, leaving their daughter with the mute nurse (Godard’s Married Woman). But all three adults are having secret affairs, and head to the same country house, where they try to play it off and have a good time together since they’re all equally busted. Dad is with hottie Anna Karina, mom is with dad’s employee Bruno, the nanny is with blonde Volker Spengler (fly guy of Satan’s Brew).
This is too many major actors in one place, and the daughter can’t hold her own, also is weirdly dubbed, but she gets to dance on her crutches to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” Of course the adults end up playing mind games, and the vibes turn very sour during the titular Q&A guessing game, then Mom shoots the Mute Nurse, kind of a bum ending.
honi soit qui mal y pense:
Good manic pervert movie, like a euro-arthouse John Waters, with rapid banter and exclusively eccentric characters. I’ve seen Kurt Raab in four other Fassbinder movies, always in minor roles. Here he’s the lead, a broke poet, having become violent and desperate with writer’s block. His put-upon wife and shut-in brother (a fly-plucker whom Kurt once calls a guter junge, hmmm) are supportive, but he finds a devoted fan of his work in Petra von Kant. Illness, murder and fake murder all follow, as Raab starts plagiarizing a famous poet and acting as if possessed by that poet, until pulled back to earth by his mess of a family.
A writer contemplates his work:
Kurt’s parents are… pleased? to see him:
A writer attempts to channel a better writer:
Good twisty wartime spy story from Paul “subtlety is for cowards” Verhoeven. Not one of his best movies – too plotty and obvious – but clearly crucial to his whole deal (it wouldn’t be his last film about resistance fighters betraying their own people for profit).
Rutger and his college buds bond over his hazing experience by entering WWII (“a spot of war would be quite exciting”), ending up on different sides, then bumping into (and/or killing) each other. Guus (4th Man star Jeroen Krabbé) becomes a bigwig friend of the Queen, sleeping with her secretary Susan (of psychic horror Patrick), while Robbie becomes a Gestapo collaborator to save his skin. Guus and Rutger team up in England, running missions back into the Netherlands. Only Rutger and his friend Paul from Turks Fruit survive (no definite word on the cockatoo).
Pre-war college dickheads:
Post-war, a dickhead in an outhouse is about to eat this grenade:
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Feest! (1963)
Since I’m watching early Verhoeven movies, I dug up this short. Slick b/w little near-drama about a schoolboy who likes a girl. After days of glances and whispers, they hang out at the school dance, dancing occasionally but with nothing really to say to each other. Meanwhile up in the tower the older boys are playing a blindfolded couples kissing game, our couple plays along but she’s not into it, slaps him and runs off. The movie’s highlight: a boring assembly speaker is named Albert Vogler.
Despite seemingly an hour of runtime spent goofing around with ghosts, and the last hour of the movie being exhausting nonstop fights, this movie finds time for a surprising amount of plot twists.
Jackie Chan is a kung fu monastery flunky as usual, when their most powerful secret book of killer moves is stolen and handed off to murderous enemy James Tien. Now James is unstoppable, as the only moves that can counter him are written in a long-lost book, which Jackie easily discovers while pissing on some ghosts. The ghosts torment everyone for a while, then help Jackie defeat a cute girl.
But while he is screwing around the cute girl’s father gets murdered by assassin spies. The Blind Monk knows something fishy is going on, and that’s because their own head monk Li Tong-Chun has been deep undercover for decades, plotting to capitulate the whole kung fu school to his secret son James Tien. Unfortunately for their dastardly plan, prankster ghosts have been training their flunky in the secret counter-moves, and Jackie comes tearing out of the building, able to take on eighteen pole fighters at a time and still have the energy to whup the two killers.
Good angle:
